About Joan Borsten

Joan Borsten is the co-founder of the Malibu Beach Recovery Center, along with her husband, Oleg Vidov. She served as CEO until 2014 and expanded operations to include a women’s only facility in West Los Angeles. Both treatment centers and an affiliated Intensive Outpatient Program have been acquired by RiverMend Health and Joan now works with them as senior advisor. She wrote this cookbook with four of the Malibu Beach Recovery Center chefs as part of her commitment to help her alumni as well as addicts around the world maintain long-term sobriety.

Joan graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and did her graduate work at the University of Southern California. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Panama before moving to Israel, where she became a staff reporter for the Jerusalem Post and then a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times. She traveled worldwide on assignment, interviewing Egyptian First Lady Jehan Sadat, Tunisian First Lady Wasilla Bourguiba and film industry luminaries such as Federico Fellini, Ingrid Bergman, Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, Raul Julia, Tony Curtis, Bruce Beresford, Roman Polanski and Walter Matthau. Joan began a career in the film industry as executive of two companies that won Best Foreign Film Oscars and went on to found the film production and distribution company Films by Jove, Inc. with her husband.